In 1995, convinced that she was becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution to global inequality, Rita Thapa quit her job with a large development agency to establish Tewa – the Nepal Women’s Fund. Her experiences of working within the formal development system had led Thapa to conclude that “we cannot do good work from flawed structures,” and that decades of aid dependency had eroded Nepalis’ belief in their ability to contribute to and participate in their own development.
That same year, a group of Kenyans began to meet regularly in Nairobi to consider why, despite a marked increase in international development funding, communities weren’t changing in any fundamental way. ‘What would be the ideal way to get community actors at the centre of their own development?’ they asked themselves. ‘What do community philanthropy, micro-finance and other practices have to offer to a new paradigm of resource-generation for development?
Almost 25 years later, Tewa has given out grants to over 500 women's groups across 70 districts of Nepal, trained over 800 local volunteers, and built up a donor base of almost 8,000 local donors: notably, until recently, grants to local groups were made using only local money. The Kenya Community Development Foundation (KDCF), meanwhile, has made grants to over 2,000 community-based organizations in all of Kenya’s 47 counties, and over the past eight years has mobilized over US $1 million in local money.
